Behind me the Tulpa roared. “Break it down!”
The woman smiled…with sparkling spiked teeth. “I have a better idea.”
And though she looked too fragile to resist a blown kiss, much less the Tulpa’s anger, she effortlessly scooped me up at the waist, her translucent, shiny fingers winnowing their way down to my ankles. I was so disoriented-and so relieved to no longer be cooking from the inside out-it took me a moment to realize I was floating. “Shit-wait!”
The Tulpa protested too. “You can’t-!”
“Just did.” Her voice, like her hair, was effervescent and snapping sharp, the syllables of her words running together in churning ripples to reverberate off one another.
“It’s a law!”
“Meant to be broken.” She waved the Tulpa away, and flashed those pointed teeth again, more pearl than white. She glanced up to find me watching. “Come. We must hurry.”
“The mortal-” I began, flailing as she shifted her feet.
“-is already dead.” She was studying the distance between the floor and the top of my head, and said it without emotion. “The Tulpa is animating him with residual energy.”
“It’s an illusion?” I took my eyes off her long enough to gaze up at Vincent again. He was still rotating slowly, drifting closer to the center of the black hole, but too far removed now for me to make out the expression on his frozen face.
“Yes, but the heat melting this building is not. Let’s go.” I’d floated higher, and she pulled me beneath the center of the black hole, straight-armed, like I was a kite. Wait a minute…
The Tulpa objected as well. “You can’t shield her forever!”
“Don’t need to,” she muttered, almost sounding bored. She grabbed my other ankle, steadying me, the coolness from her palms spreading through my body, though I knew it was unbearably hot. Even the steel beams looked to be sweating. “Creating and sustaining a black hole burns a massive amount of fuel. You’re running out of energy at an alarming rate, am I right? Besides, I could just take her back to Midheaven with me. You’ll never touch her there.”
I didn’t think it was possible for the Tulpa to blanch, but he did, and wondering what, and where, Midheaven was, I looked up.
That’s how I saw Vincent’s body suddenly stretch like spaghetti, his head whipping back in a sharp centrifugal swirl. For a moment I thought the rest of him would follow, but people weren’t meant to enter black holes, and in the next instant his body was rent by the tides of gravitational force, snapping, dissipating, destroyed so thoroughly, it was as if he’d never been. I swallowed down a scream. The woman and the Tulpa seemed not to notice.
“Now scoot along, tulpa,” And she said his name like she would say cat or dog, like he was a thing and not a person. The black hole wobbled in the sky, and the Tulpa let out an infuriated but hollow yell.
The woman turned her back on him and whispered to me, “Are you ready for this?”
“No, no, no!” I said, suddenly panicked, knowing what she was thinking. “I was never good at science, but I know if you get too close to a black hole, there’s no escaping it. So maybe we can talk about fighting or shooting our way out of here instead. I-I’m really good at that.”
“Okay, shooting. We’ll do that.” She turned her wicked grin on me. “I’ll be the propulsion. You’re the rocket.”
And she bent her shimmering knees and shot into the air with an explosion to match the Tulpa’s initial blast. I-we, because the woman was still anchored to me-shot past him so fast, he was still staring at the spot where we’d been standing, and the vertebrae in my neck cracked with the pressure of our ascent. There was a sucking sound, the breach and subsequent burst of the black hole disintegrating behind me, and then we were free, darting through the crisp night, Vegas spread below us like a hard, glittering pool. Wind whipped my hair and whistled in my ears, and through the weight of the night air I could hear the woman screaming delightedly behind me. At least someone was having fun.
And then, as we slowed to an apex, the Tulpa’s words revisited me. Glancing down, I realized what basic universal law this woman had broken.
Gravity, I thought frantically, and immediately began falling.
4
The great planets revolving around our sun are subject to the same basic law that had an apple thrumming Newton on his brilliant beaner. We-an iridescent woman who scoffed at the Tulpa’s empowered rage, and me-had broken that law, and while I was sure there’d be cosmic hell to pay for the breach, I was hoping it wouldn’t be due until well after we’d landed.
And yet I couldn’t help but be awed. Supernaturals could jump-damned high too-but we couldn’t fly. Outside of a steel bird, I’d never seen the entire town spread below me like a bright LEGOLAND replica, and my cannonball shot over its center made me feel momentarily possessive of everything below me, and unreasonably proud. The city’s peace in the clear, cool night put me in mind of a snow globe at rest, all the glitter and sparkle winking up at me from the earth’s floor, as if the world’s orderliness depended only on perspective. Wind rippled in my mouth as I smiled back…and then, with only a hundred feet left between the ground and me, that bitch let go.
Fifty feet, thirty feet-the descent more dizzying than the initial blast-I felt my hair fluttering like a banner behind me as I streaked toward hard earth. I acclimated myself enough to know where we were heading-a swath of dirt outside the old rail yard’s fence-but that wasn’t my most pressing interest. As the ground rushed up at me, the speed had my once-mortal instincts recoiling. I pinwheeled in the air, anticipating the crash, wondering if bent knees, proper form, and superhuman healing was enough to get me out of this one, and so the movement spied from the corner of my eye barely registered.
It was the woman, or possibly just part of her, slipping beneath me to break my fall like a trampoline. I spotted the nucleus of a glimmering sheet of…well, something, and trying not to think too hard about what that something was, I landed as hard as I expected…right into its pillowing middle. It shot me back up, dangerously high, so I endeavored to return to its middle upon each subsequent bounce, and when I was bounding only as high as a single-story building, it disappeared entirely, so that I landed in a bone-jolting crouch on the gritty earth. When I looked up, the pale pearl of a woman, still ethereal and pretty and radiant as an opal, was standing beside me.
I opened my mouth, but she cut me off with one word. “Portal.”
So we weren’t out of danger yet. My mouth snapped shut, and I followed her back into the tight weave of city blocks, both of us canvassing the doorways and windows for a small, variable star. I watched her sail along in front of me, knowing I should think of something intelligent to ask or say, but she didn’t seem inclined to talk until we were well away from the Tulpa, and that was fine with me. My insides were still raw and bruised and burned.
Lately I’d been trying to avoid using the portals. I’d last accessed one during a training session where we were attempting to spot false entries, which we’d discovered had been set around the city like mousetraps to ensnare us until the Shadows could check them, and kill us. Although it’d been daylight on this side of the portal, the sun had flipped around on itself on the other side of that supernatural gateway, and I walked into a replica of the street I’d left, but for the darkness blanketing the earth while the heavens were spotlit by the sun. The alternate reality was colorless, with a silver-gray haze reducing everything to a shadowy line drawing. It had also been bitingly cold…unbearable to a desert rat like myself, and the whole experience had totally creeped me out.